What’s
at stake: We support the US defense of Israel from
foreign invasion; never again 1948 and 1967.
But that is not the problem for one of the most powerfully armed
countries in the world, including nuclear weapons. The problem is the nullification of the
two-state solution for peace by the gradual destruction of the Palestinian territories
by occupation, bombings, shootings, tear gas, arrests, searches, blockades,
house demolitions, road blocks, the Wall dividing the West Bank, and most of
all the devastating invasions of Gaza and the settlements throughout the West
Bank. In response Gaza has tunnels and
comparatively feeble rockets. Ironically,
today, August 30, is the UN International DAY of Victims of Enforced
Disappearance. Israel is trying to make
the Palestinians and the dream of a Palestinian state disappear.

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and
women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy
combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes
the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They
should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should
the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little
snakes will be raised there.”

Ayelet Shaked, Member of Israeli Parliament

I am Jewish but that identity doesn’t define me. I
was Bar Mitzvah-ed, but that day ended my religious connection. I parroted some
memorized Hebrew, but I certainly couldn’t understand it. I celebrated but only
because I had too. Family and all.

More, once, and only once, before or since, have I
directly, personally, encountered outright anti Semitism. A parent of someone I
was dating flippantly said something about Jews controlling the world and I
nearly assaulted him. I do not have a lot of patience for racism in any
context, but I was surprised that his idiotic verbiage set me off as much as it
did. It wasn’t blood ties, and it certainly wasn’t religious beliefs that
spurred my reaction. So I guess saying the Four Questions a few times as a kid
may have had some modest cultural impact.

Does some residue of my childhood tangential
Jewish involvement, perhaps having liked Rabbi Schankman of Temple Israel
up to my becoming thirteen, cause me, now, to feel just a bit more aggressively
outraged and nauseated by the current events in Gaza then if I hadn’t been to Temple
a few times? I have no idea, but I don’t think it matters. What does matter is
the absolute, unmitigated horror that is now occurring in Gaza. Yet, there are
so many horrors. Can words situate this one in the evil hall of fame?

When I was becoming adult, violence was Vietnam. In
the midst of that, I wondered how humans who had enjoyed even modest personal
freedom and development, rather than, say, being beat up and caged as kids and
denied education and culture, could be even a fraction as cynical and
delusional as my own government was.

But while “destroying the City to Save it” set an
incredibly high standard for vile rationalization – I can’t help but notice the
“to save it” part of the phrase. In those days, and even more so since the
movements of those days had their effects, if nothing else, to perpetrate vile
actions in pursuit of reasons of state or reasons of profit required aggressive
claims of high motives. Yet, for the Israelis, this no longer seems true.

Yes, for international consumption they fabricate
idiotic justifications – mainly they say this is our defense against them
defending themselves. And, just to be clear, to those who say that Israel has a
right to defend itself, there is only one correct answer. Yes. It does.

And what that means is to escape being attacked by
the occupied, Israel can leave Gaza, cease the occupation, cease the racism.
That is the only legitimate way for an occupying force – anywhere, anytime – to
defend itself against the colonized. Stop perpetrating the crime. There is no
warrant for an occupier to get violent. That is just more crime. The solution
is to get out.

If you don’t understand that, think of it this way.
Imagine the British who were in the U.S. fighting the colonists saying, hey –
we have a right to defend ourselves. The reply ought to have been: yes, you do,
and your right to do so sanctifies your leaving, but not your shooting us.

Or how about the Nazi in France,
or perhaps a better analogy is the Nazi in Poland – in Warsaw.
Imagine they said, hey, we have a right to defend ourselves. Again, the reply
ought to have been, yes, you do, and that right sanctifies your leaving, but
not your obliterating our lives, culture, and constructions.

Ditto for the U.S. in Indochina and a long list of
other places. And ditto for Israel in Gaza. Defend yourselves, by all means,
sure, and to do so, get out.

But that isn’t my real point in this little rant.
Rather, I want to note something new about the events, perhaps worth a few
words. It is that the Israelis seem quite content, certainly for domestic
consumption and to a degree even internationally, to make no bones about what
they are doing.

Knock knock – goes the small missile rap on the
roof. Boom goes the hospital underneath shortly later. No worry, just “dead
snake” patients and their dead snake doctors.

Okay, this is obviously barbaric. If you can’t see
that, I don’t know how to better communicate with you about it. But the thing
is that these “warnings” also may seem to you insane. It isn’t just the vile cynicism
of telling people to get out when the only place they can go is a place
that is likely next on the target list. The warnings also make totally evident,
and utterly undeniable, what most countries try to hide, or to not be guilty of
in better cases.

That is, the knocking to announce what is coming
makes totally evident that the Israelis are not hitting houses and hospitals
and the rest of Gaza’s life and achievement by accident, but intentionally. The
knocking first says, we can hit whatever we want, down to small homes, whenever
we want, down to the minute. They are literally saying, here, look at what we
did. See the kids shattered and shredded? See the hospital made into ash? See
the power plant shooting only flames into the surroundings? See the school, the
mosque, the park, the beach, the water sources all covered in rubble and torn
flesh? What you see is precisely what we intended to do. There is no collateral
damage. There is just intended damage. We Israelis actually want to kill
whatever moves. And we want to tell those still moving when we are done that we
did it, willfully. We know how to communicate!

When I was in High School I used to stay up nights,
sometimes, trying to understand how someone could become a good German. How
could people go about daily life while their country engaged in hellish
infernal injustice – in that case, the ovens. But I understood in time. The
pressure of wanting to get by, of wanting to fit and of not thinking there was
any alternative, and, for even more people, the bliss of ignorance (well
guarded by asking few if any questions), and, for even more people, literally
ignorant fear and intentionally stirred up desire for revenge, did the trick.
And I saw it all in the U.S., during the Indochina campaigns, and regarding the
history of racism, and now too, as we destroy the environment. So I get that.

But then there are the storm troopers. The
Brownshirts. This is harder to explain. I used to think maybe it was something
about the German language – I knew they didn’t have different DNA but they did,
after all, talk different. And then I learned that the training that produces
soldiers, and to only a slightly lesser extent the education that produces
adults, is precisely about obliterating human judgment and sentiment. And that
many succumb. And so now we have Israelis. And the capacity for self delusion
and ugly denial and even aggressive and fascistic purpose, in the broad
population – even if they didn’t constantly claim to have deep and special
understanding of the ills of racism – is truly remarkable. Truly sad. Truly
enraging.

Even as I cry for Palestine’s pain and hope they
prevail, part of me also wonders, when the dust clears, what the hell are the
Israelis who are urging incinerating Palestine and Palestinians going to tell
themselves so they can live with themselves? The corpses that look so human
were really snakes? Or that I was, at least for a time, a monster? And what
will they tell their kids? In order to live with their kids. And for their kids
not to become monsters – one hopes.

And arguably even more so, what are the Americans
with a disgusting past of supporting this horror going to tell themselves? And
to tell their kids? And I fear the answer may be nothing at all. Because the
ash can of history – which is CNN and the New
York Times – may lug away culpability and truth by way of the sewage that
is their reporting.

Gaza...
Chomsky from ZCommunications August 3,
2014

ZCommunications

to James

[Chomsky is discussing the US shooting down of
an Iranian passenger plane]: “…no search
for victims, no passionate denunciations of those responsible, no eloquent
laments by the US Ambassador to the UN about the “immense and
heart-wrenching loss” when the airliner was downed. Iranian condemnations
were occasionally noted, but dismissed as “boilerplate attacks on the
United States” (Philip Shenon, New
York Times).

Small wonder, then, that this insignificant
earlier event merited only a few scattered words in the US media during the
vast furor over a real crime, in which the demonic enemy might have been
indirectly involved.

One exception was in the London Daily Mail,
where Dominick Lawson wrote that although “Putin’s apologists” might bring
up the Iran Air attack, the comparison actually demonstrates our high moral
values as contrasted with the miserable Russians, who try to evade their
responsibility for MH 17 with lies while Washington at once announced that
the US warship had shot down the Iranian aircraft — righteously. What more
powerful evidence could there be of our nobility and their depravity?

We
know why Ukrainians and Russians are in their own countries, but one might
ask what exactly the Vincennes was doing in Iranian waters. The answer is
simple. It was defending Washington’s great friend Saddam Hussein in his
murderous aggression against Iran. For the victims, the shoot-down was no
small matter. It was a major factor in Iran’s recognition that it could not
fight on any longer, according to historian Dilip Hiro.

It
is worth remembering the extent of Washington’s devotion to its friend
Saddam. Reagan removed him from the terrorist list so that aid could be
sent to expedite his assault on Iran, and later denied his terrible crimes
against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons, blocking
congressional condemnations. He also accorded Saddam a privilege otherwise
granted only to Israel: there was no serious reaction when Iraq attacked
the USS Stark with missiles, killing 37 crewmen, much like the case of the
USS Liberty, attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and torpedo ships in 1967,
killing 34 crewmen.

Reagan’s
successor, Bush I, went on to provide further aid to Saddam, badly needed
after the war with Iran that he launched. Bush also invited Iraqi nuclear
engineers to come to the US for advanced training in weapons production. In
April 1990, Bush dispatched a high-level Senate delegation, led by future
Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, to convey his warm regards to
his friend Saddam and to assure him that he should disregard irresponsible
criticism from the “haughty and pampered press,” and that such miscreants
had been removed from Voice of America. The fawning before Saddam continued
until he turned into a new Hitler a few months later by disobeying orders,
or perhaps misunderstanding them, and invading Kuwait, with illuminating
consequences that are worth reviewing once again, though I will leave this
interesting matter aside here.

Other
precedents had long since been dismissed to the memory hole as without
significance. One example is the Libyan civilian airliner that was lost in
a sandstorm in 1973 when it was shot down by US-supplied Israeli jets, two
minutes flight time from Cairo, towards which it was heading. The death
toll was only 110 that time. Israel blamed the French pilot, with the
endorsement of the New York Times, which added that the Israeli
act was “at worst…an act of callousness that not even the savagery of
previous Arab actions can excuse.” The incident was passed over quickly in
the United States, with little criticism. When Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir arrived in the US four days later, she faced few embarrassing
questions and returned home with new gifts of military aircraft.

The
reaction was much the same when Washington’s favored Angolan terrorist
organization UNITA claimed to have shot down two civilian airliners at the
same time, among other cases.

Returning
to the sole authentic and truly horrific crime, the New York Times reported
that American UN ambassador Samantha Power “choked up as she spoke of
infants who perished in the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine [and] The
Dutch foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, could barely contain his anger as
he recalled seeing pictures of `thugs’ snatching wedding bands off the
fingers of the victims.”

At
the same session, the report continues, there was also “a long recitation
of names and ages — all belonging to children killed in the latest Israeli
offensive in Gaza.” The only reported reaction was by Palestinian envoy
Riyad Mansour, who “grew quiet in the middle of” the recitation.

The
Israeli attack on Gaza in July did, however, elicit outrage in Washington.
President Obama “reiterated his `strong condemnation’ of rocket and tunnel
attacks against Israel by the militant group Hamas,” The Hill reported. He
“also expressed ‘growing concern’ about the rising number of Palestinian
civilian deaths in Gaza,” but without condemnation. The Senate filled that
gap, voting unanimously to support Israeli actions in Gaza while condemning
“the unprovoked rocket fire at Israel” by Hamas and calling on “Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the unity governing
arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel.”

As
for Congress, perhaps it’s enough to join the 80% of the public who
disapprove of their performance, though the word “disapprove” is rather too
mild in this case. But in Obama’s defense, it may be that he has no idea
what Israel is doing in Gaza with the weapons that he is kind enough to
supply to them. After all, he relies on US intelligence, which may be too
busy collecting phone calls and email messages of citizens to pay much
attention to such marginalia. It may be useful, then, to review what we all
should know.

Israel’s
goal had long been a simple one: quiet-for-quiet, a return to the norm
(though now it may demand even more). What then is the norm?

For
the West Bank, the norm has been that Israel carries forward its illegal
construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate
into Israel whatever might be of value to it, meanwhile consigning
Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to intense repression
and violence.

For
the past 14 years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two
Palestinian children a week. The latest Israeli rampage was set of by the
brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the
occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys were shot dead in
the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited no attention, which is
understandable, since it is routine. “The institutionalised disregard for
Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort
to violence,” the respected Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but
also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”

Quiet-for-quiet
has also enabled Israel to carry forward its program of separating Gaza
from the West Bank. That program has been pursued vigorously, always with
US support, ever since the US and Israel accepted the Oslo accords, which
declare the two regions to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at
the map explains the rationale. Gaza provides Palestine’s only access to
the outside world, so once the two are separated, any autonomy that Israel
might grant to Palestinians in the West Bank would leave them effectively
imprisoned between hostile states, Israel and Jordan. The
imprisonment will become even more severe as Israel continues its
systematic program of expelling Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and
constructing Israeli settlements there, enjoying quiet-for-quiet.

The
norm in Gaza was described in detail by the heroic Norwegian trauma surgeon
Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza’s main hospital through Israel’s most
grotesque crimes and returned again for the current onslaught. In June
2014, immediately before the latest Israeli onslaught, he submitted a
report on the Gaza health sector to UNRWA, the UN Agency that tries
desperately, on a shoestring, to care for refugees.

“At
least 57 % of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 % are now aid
recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean
that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while
over 90 % of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human
consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again
attacks water and sewage systems, leaving over a million people with even
more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life.

The
distinguished human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who has remained in Gaza
through years of Israeli brutality and terror, reports that “The most
common sentence I heard when people began to talk about ceasefire:
everybody says it’s better for all of us to die and not go back to the
situation we used to have before this war. We don’t want that again. We
have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap.
Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am
talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: everybody is
saying that.”

Similar
sentiments have been widely voiced: it is better to die with dignity than
to be slowly strangled by the torturer.

For
Gaza, the plans for the norm were explained forthrightly by Dov Weissglass,
a confidant of Ariel Sharon, the person who negotiated the withdrawal of
Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. Hailed as a grand gesture in Israel and
among acolytes and the deluded elsewhere, the withdrawal was in reality a
carefully staged “national trauma,” properly ridiculed by informed Israeli
commentators, among them Israel’s leading sociologist, the late Baruch
Kimmerling.

What
actually happened is that Israeli hawks, led by Sharon, realized that it
made good sense to transfer the illegal settlers from their subsidized
communities in devastated Gaza, where they were sustained at exorbitant
cost, to subsidized settlements in the other occupied territories, which
Israel intends to keep. But instead of simply transferring them, as would
have been simple enough, it was clearly more useful to present the world
with images of little children pleading with soldiers not to destroy their
homes, amidst cries of “Never Again,” with the implication obvious. What
made the farce even more transparent was that it was a replica of the
staged trauma when Israel had to evacuate the Egyptian Sinai in 1982. But
it played very well for the intended audience at home and abroad.

Weissglass
provided his own description of the transfer of settlers from Gaza to other
occupied territories: “What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was
that [the major settlement blocs in the West Bank] would not be dealt with
at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn
into Finns” – but a special kind of Finns, who would quietly accept rule by
a foreign power. “The significance is the freezing of the political process,”
Weissglass continued. “And when you freeze that process you prevent the
establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the
refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that
is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed
from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush's]
authority and permission and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Weisglass
explained further that Gazans would remain “on a diet, but not to make them
die of hunger” – which would not help Israel’s fading reputation. With
their vaunted technical efficiency, Israeli experts determined precisely
how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare survival, while also
depriving them of medicines and other means of decent life. Israeli
military forces confined them by land, sea and air to what British Prime
Minister David Cameron accurately described as a prison camp. The Israeli
withdrawal left Israel in total control of Gaza, hence the occupying power
under international law. And to close the prison walls even more tightly,
Israel excluded Palestinians from a large region along the border,
including a third or more of Gaza’s scarce arable land. The justification
is security for Israelis, which could be just as well achieved by
establishing the security zone on the Israeli side of the border, or more
fully, by ending the savage siege and other punishments.

The
official story is that after Israel graciously handed Gaza over to the
Palestinians, in the hope that they would construct a flourishing state,
they revealed their true nature by subjecting Israel to unremitting rocket
attack and forcing the captive population to become martyrs to so that
Israel would be pictured in a bad light. Reality is rather different.

A
few weeks after Israeli troops withdrew, leaving the occupation intact,
Palestinians committed a major crime. In January 2006, they voted the wrong
way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of the
Parliament to Hamas. The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to
the destruction of Israel. In reality, its leaders have repeatedly made it
clear and explicit that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord
with the international consensus that has been blocked by the US and Israel
for 40 years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of
Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is
implementing that commitment.

True,
Israel accepted the Road Map for reaching a two-state settlement initiated
by President Bush and adopted by the Quartet that is to supervise it: the
US, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia. But as he accepted
the Road Map, Prime Minister Sharon at once added fourteen reservations
that effectively nullify it. The facts were known to activists, but
revealed to the general public for the first time in Jimmy Carter’s book
“Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” They remain under wraps in media
reporting and commentary.

The
(unrevised) 1999 platform of Israel’s governing party, Binyamin Netanyahu’s
Likud, “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west
of the Jordan river.” And for those who like to obsess about meaningless
charters, the core component of Likud, Menahem Begin’s Herut, has yet to abandon
its founding doctrine that the territory on both sides of the Jordan is
part of the Land of Israel.

The
crime of the Palestinians in January 2006 was punished at once. The US and
Israel, with Europe shamefully trailing behind, imposed harsh sanctions on
the errant population and Israel stepped up its violence. By June, when the
attacks sharply escalated, Israel had already fired more than 7700 [155 mm]
shells at northern Gaza.

The
US and Israel quickly initiated plans for a military coup to overthrow the
elected government. When Hamas had the effrontery to foil the plans, the
Israeli assaults and the siege became far more severe, justified by the
claim that Hamas had taken over the Gaza Strip by force – which is not
entirely false, though something rather crucial is omitted.

There
should be no need to review again the horrendous record since. The
relentless siege and savage attacks are punctuated by episodes of “mowing
the lawn,” to borrow Israel’s cheery expression for its periodic exercises
of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a “war of defense.” Once the
lawn is mowed and the desperate population seeks to reconstruct somehow
from the devastation and the murders, there is a cease-fire agreement.
These have been regularly observed by Hamas, as Israel concedes, until
Israel violates them with renewed violence.

The
most recent cease-fire was established after Israel’s October 2012 assault.
Though Israel maintained its devastating siege, Hamas observed the
cease-fire, as Israeli officials concede. Matters changed in June, when
Fatah and Hamas forged a unity agreement, which established a new
government of technocrats that had no Hamas participation and accepted all
of the demands of the Quartet. Israel was naturally furious, even more so
when even the US joined in signaling approval. The unity agreement not only
undercuts Israel’s claim that it cannot negotiate with a divided Palestine,
but also threatens the long term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank
and pursuing its destructive policies in both of the regions.

Something
had to be done, and an occasion arose shortly after, when the three Israeli
boys were murdered in the West Bank. The Netanyahu government knew at once
that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the
opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank, targeting Hamas.
Netanhayu claimed to have certain knowledge that Hamas was responsible.
That too was a lie, as recognized early on. There has been no pretense of
presenting evidence. One of Israel’s leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi
Eldar, reported almost at once that the killers very likely came from a
dissident clan in Hebron that has long been a thorn in the side of Hamas.
Eldar added that “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the
leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.” The
Israeli police have since been searching for two members of the clan, still
claiming, without evidence, that they are “Hamas terrorists.”

The
18-day rampage however did succeed in undermining the feared unity
government, and sharply increasing Israeli repression. According to Israeli
military sources, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335
affiliated with Hamas, and killed six Palestinians, also searching
thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000. Israel also conducted
dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing 5 Hamas members on July 7.

Hamas
finally reacted with its first rockets in 19 months, Israeli officials
reported, providing Israel with the pretext for Operation Protective Edge
on July 8.

There
has been ample reporting of the exploits of the self-declared Most Moral
Army in the World, which should receive the Nobel Peace Prize according to
Israel’s Ambassador to the US. By the end of July, some 1500 Palestinians
had been killed, exceeding the toll of the Cast Lead crimes of 2008-9, 70%
of them civilians including hundreds of women and children. And 3 civilians
in Israel. Large areas of Gaza had been turned into rubble. During brief
bombing pauses, relatives desperately seek shattered bodies or household
items in the ruins of homes. The main power plant was attacked – not for
the first time; this is an Israeli specialty — sharply curtailing the
already very limited electricity and worse yet, reducing still further the
minimal availability of fresh water. Another war crime. Meanwhile rescue
teams and ambulances are repeatedly attacked. As atrocities mount
throughout Gaza, Israel claims that its goal is to destroy tunnels at the
border.

Four
hospitals had been attacked, each yet another war crime. The first was the
Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, attacked on the day the
ground forces invaded the prison. A few lines in the New York Times, within
a story about the ground invasion, reported that “most but not all of the
17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity
was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said.
`We evacuated them under fire,’ said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital
spokesman. `Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs,
some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of
panic in the hospital’.”

Three
working hospitals were then attacked, patients and staff left to their own
devices to survive. One Israeli crime did receive wide condemnation: the
attack on a UN school that was harboring 3300 terrified refugees who had
fled the ruins of their neighborhoods on the orders of the Israeli army.
The outraged UNWRA Commission-General Pierre Kraehenbuehl said “I condemn
in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law
by Israeli forces…. Today the world stands disgraced.” There were at least
three Israeli strikes at the refugee shelter, a site well known to the
Israeli army. “The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School
and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people
was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its
protection,” Kraehenbuehl said, “the last being at ten to nine last night,
just hours before the fatal shelling.”

The
attack was also condemned “in the strongest possible terms” by the normally
reticent Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon. “Nothing is more shameful
than attacking sleeping children,” he said. There is no record that the US
Ambassador to the UN “choked up as she spoke of infants who perished” in
the Israeli strike – or in the attack on Gaza altogether.

But
White House spokesperson Bernadette Meehan did respond. She said that “We
are extremely concerned that thousands of internally displaced Palestinians
who have been called on by the Israeli military to evacuate their homes are
not safe in UN designated shelters in Gaza. We also condemn those
responsible for hiding weapons in United Nations facilities in Gaza,” she
added, omitting to mention that these facilities were empty and that the
weapons were found by UNRWA, who had condemned those who hid them.

Later,
the administration joined in stronger condemnations of this particular
crime – while at the same time releasing more weapons to Israel. In doing
so, however, Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren told reporters. “And it’s
become clear that the Israelis need to do more to live up to their very
high standards … for protecting civilian life” – the high standards it has
been exhibiting for many years while using US arms, and again today.

Attacks
on UN compounds sheltering refugees is another Israeli specialty. One
famous incident is the Israeli bombardment of the clearly identified UN
refugee shelter in Qana during Shimon Peres’s murderous Grapes of Wrath
campaign, killing 106 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge there,
including 52 children. To be sure, Israel is not alone in this practice.
Twenty years earlier, its South African ally had launched an airborne
strike deep into Angola against Cassinga, a refugee camp run by the
Namibian resistance SWAPO.

Israeli
officials laud the humanity of the army, which even goes so far as to
inform residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism,
sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli
journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands
of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally
dangerous, 10 kilometers away.” In fact, no place in the prison is safe
from Israeli sadism.

Some
find it difficult to profit from Israel’s solicitude. An appeal to the
world by the Gaza Catholic Church quotes a priest who explains the plight
of residents of the House of Christ, a care home dedicated to looking after
disabled children. They were removed to the Holy Family Church because
Israel was targeting the area, but now, he writes, “The church of Gaza has
received an order to evacuate. They will bomb the Zeitun area and the
people are already fleeing. The problem is that the priest Fr George and
the three nuns of Mother Teresa have 29 handicapped children and nine old
ladies who can’t move. How will they manage to leave? If anyone can
intercede with someone in power, and pray, please do it.”

Actually,
it shouldn’t be difficult. Israel already provided the instructions at the
Wafa Rehabilitation hospital. And fortunately, at least some states are
interceding, as best they can. Five Latin American states — Brazil, Chile,
Ecuador, El Salvador and Peru – withdrew their ambassadors from Israel,
following the course of Bolivia and Venezuela, which had broken relations
in reaction to earlier Israeli crimes. These principled acts are another
sign of the remarkable change in world relations as much of Latin America
begins to free itself from western domination, sometimes providing a model
of civilized behavior to those who controlled it for 500 years.

The
hideous revelations elicited a different reaction from the Most Moral
President in the World, the usual one: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter
condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation by both sides. In his
August 1 press conference, he did express concern for Palestinians “caught
in the crossfire” (where?) while again vigorously supporting the right of
Israel to defend itself, like everyone. Not quite everyone. Not of course
Palestinians. They have no right to defend themselves, surely not when
Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet-for-quiet:
stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a
savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their
protector.

Palestinians
are like black Africans, the Namibian refugees in the Cassinga camp for
example, all terrorists for whom the right of defense does not exist.

A
72-hour humanitarian truce was supposed to go into effect at 8am on August
1. It broke down almost at once. As I write, a few hours later, there are
conflicting accounts and a good deal remains unclear. According to a press
release of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, which has a solid
reputation for reliability, one of its field workers in Rafah, at the
Egyptian border in the south, heard Israeli artillery firing at
about 8:05am. By about 9:30am, after reports that an Israeli
soldier had been captured, intensive air and artillery bombing of Rafah was
underway, killing probably dozens of people and injuring hundreds who had
returned to their homes after the ceasefire entered into effect, though
numbers could not yet be verified.

The
day before, on July 31, the Coastal Water Utility, the sole provider of
water in the Gaza Strip, announced that it could no longer provide water or
sanitation services because of lack of fuel and frequent attacks on
personnel. Al Mezan reports that by then, “almost all primary health
services have stopped in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of water, garbage
collection and environment health services. UNRWA had also warned about the
risk of imminent spreading of disease owing to the halt of water and
sanitation services.” Meanwhile, on the eve of the cease-fire, Israeli
missiles fired from aircraft continued to kill and wound victims throughout
the region.

When
the current episode of sadism is finally called off, whenever that will be,
Israel hopes to be free to pursue its criminal policies in the occupied
territories without interference, and with the US support it has enjoyed in
the past: military, economic, and diplomatic; and also ideological, by
framing the issues in conformity to Israeli doctrines. Gazans will be free
to return to the norm in their Israeli-run prison, while in the West Bank
they can watch in peace as Israel dismantles what remains of their
possessions.

That
is the likely outcome if the US maintains its decisive and virtually
unilateral support for Israeli crimes and its rejection of the longstanding
international consensus on diplomatic settlement. But the future will be
quite different if the US withdraws that support. In that case it would be
possible to move towards the “enduring solution” in Gaza that Secretary of
State Kerry called for, eliciting hysterical condemnation in Israel because
the phrase could be interpreted as calling for an end to Israel’s siege and
regular attacks. And – horror of horrors – the phrase might even be
interpreted as calling for implementation of international law in the rest
of the occupied territories.

It
is not that Israel’s security would be threatened by adherence to
international law; it would very likely be enhanced. But as explained 40
years ago by Israeli general Ezer Weizman, later president, Israel could
then not “exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now
embodies.”

There
are similar cases in recent history. Indonesian generals swore that they
would never abandon what Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans called
“the Indonesian Province of East Timor” as he was making a deal to steal
Timorese oil. And as long as the ruling generals retained US support
through decades of virtually genocidal slaughter, their goals were
realistic. Finally, in September 1999, under considerable domestic and
international pressure, President Clinton informed them quietly that the
game was over and they instantly withdrew – while Evans turned to his new
career as the lauded apostle of “Responsibility to Protect,” to be sure, in
a version designed to permit western resort to violence at will.

Another
relevant case is South Africa. In 1958, South Africa’s foreign minister
informed the US ambassador that although his country was becoming a pariah
state, it would not matter as long as US support continued. His assessment
proved fairly accurate. Thirty years later, Reagan was the last significant
holdout in supporting the apartheid regime, which was still sustaining
itself. Within a few years, Washington joined the world, and the regime
collapsed – not for that reason alone of course; one crucial factor was the
remarkable Cuban role in the liberation of Africa, generally ignored in the
West though not in Africa.

Forty
years ago Israel made the fateful decision to choose expansion over
security, rejecting a full peace treaty offered by Egypt in return for
evacuation from the occupied Egyptian Sinai, where Israel was initiating
extensive settlement and development projects. It has adhered to that
policy ever since, making essentially the same judgment as South Africa did
in 1958.

In
the case of Israel, if the US decided to join the world, the impact would
be far greater. Relations of power allow nothing else, as has been
demonstrated over and over when Washington has demanded that Israel abandon
cherished goals. Furthermore, Israel by now has little recourse, after
having adopted policies that turned it from a country that was greatly
admired to one that is feared and despised, a course it is pursuing with
blind determination today in its resolute march towards moral deterioration
and possible ultimate destruction.

Could
US policy change? It’s not impossible. Public opinion has shifted
considerably in recent years, particularly among the young, and it cannot
be completely ignored. For some years there has been a good basis for
public demands that Washington observe its own laws and cut off military
aid to Israel. US law requires that “no security assistance may be provided
to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of
gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Israel most
certainly is guilty of this consistent pattern, and has been for many
years. That is why Amnesty International, in the course of Israel’s
murderous Cast Lead operation in Gaza, called for an arms embargo against
Israel (and Hamas). Senator Patrick Leahy, author of this provision of the
law, has brought up its potential applicability to Israel in specific
cases, and with a well-conducted educational, organizational, and activist
effort such initiatives could be pursued successively. That could have a
very significant impact in itself, while also providing a springboard for
further actions not only to punish Israel for its criminal behavior, but
also to compel Washington to become part of “the international community”
and to observe international law and decent moral principles.

Nothing
could be more significant for the tragic Palestinian victims of many years
of violence and repression.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky discusses U.S.
support for Israel; the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS); and
the blockade of Gaza. "In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing
is much worse than apartheid," Chomsky says. "To call it apartheid is
a gift to Israel, at least if by 'apartheid' you mean South African-style
apartheid. … There’s a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists
needed the black population. That was their workforce. The Israeli relationship
to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just
don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison."

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as
we continue our conversation with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. The
world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author has written more than a
hundred books; one of his latest, Gaza in Crisis. I interviewed him
on Thursday.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, I wanted to ask you
about your recent piece for The
Nation on Israel-Palestine and BDS. You were critical of the
effectiveness of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. One of the
many responses came from Yousef
Munayyer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund and its educational
program, the Palestine Center. He wrote, quote, "Chomsky’s criticism
ofBDS seems to be that it hasn’t changed the power dynamic yet, and thus
that it can’t. There is no doubt the road ahead is a long one for BDS, but
there is also no doubt the movement is growing ... All other paths toward
change, including diplomacy and armed struggle, have so far proved ineffective,
and some have imposed significant costs on Palestinian life and
livelihood." Could you respond?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, actually, I did
respond. You can find it on The Nationwebsite.
But in brief, far from being critical of BDS, I was strongly supportive of
it. One of the oddities of what’s called the BDS movement is that
they can’t—many of the activists just can’t see support as support unless it
becomes something like almost worship: repeat the catechism. If you take a look
at that article, it very strongly supported these tactics. In fact, I was
involved in them and supporting them before the BDS movement even
existed. They’re the right tactics.

But it should be second nature to activists—and it
usually is—that you have to ask yourself, when you conduct some tactic, when
you pursue it, what the effect is going to be on the victims. You don’t pursue
a tactic because it makes you feel good. You pursue it because it’s going—you
estimate that it’ll help the victims. And you have to make choices. This goes
way back. You know, say, back during the Vietnam War, there were debates about
whether you should resort to violent tactics, say Weathermen-style tactics. You
could understand the motivation—people were desperate—but the Vietnamese were
strongly opposed. And many of us, me included, were also opposed, not because
the horrors don’t justify some strong action, but because the consequences
would be harm to the victims. The tactics would increase support for the
violence, which in fact is what happened. Those questions arise all the time.

As
a new 72-hour ceasefire takes hold in Gaza, we turn to part two of our
interview with world-renowned dissident and linguist, MIT Professor
Noam Chomsky. Criticizing U.S. media coverage ...Read More →

MIT
Professor Noam Chomsky discusses U.S. support for Israel; the boycott,
divestment and sanctions movement (BDS); and the blockade of Gaza.
"In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is ...Read More →

On
Gaza, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky says the debate inside the Israeli
government is whether to allow "bare survival" or to inflict
"misery and starvation," as a former Israeli national
security ...Read More

The 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza has entered
its final day. Talks are ongoing to extend the truce, but no
agreement has been reached. Palestinian and Israeli officials are in
Egypt, however ... Read More →

Jon Snow, a widely respected British journalist for Channel 4 News,
recently returned from Gaza to report on what he saw there. "We have
to know that in some way we actually share some responsibility for those
deaths, because for us it is no priority whatever to stop it," he
said. "Our United Nations, our government, our world is not that
interested.”

While many people voiced revulsion at the mass killing in Gaza, the U.S. Congress cheered it on -- with unanimous votes.

We can tell our representative and senators that they should be ashamed of
themselves for backing the carnage. Click here to urge them to stop feeding
Israel's military machinery, to stop supplying weapons to Israel, and to
stop helping to provide the Israeli government with immunity from legal consequences
for its actions.

In one of the largest mobilizations in solidarity
with Palestine in the United States ever, tens of thousands of people from
all across the country converged in Washington, D.C., for a rally and march to
protest the ongoing massacre in Gaza and the U.S. government's support for
Israeli war crimes. The massive demonstration is further proof that the world
is uniting for Palestine.

The demonstration received widespread coverage in
the media, challenging the dominant pro-Israel narrative. The Washington Post reported that "A
demonstration drew thousands to the White House and the streets of downtown
Washington on Saturday afternoon." ABC News said the demonstration
turned"Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Square, the park opposite the
White House, into a sea of demonstrators."

The
politicians and commentators who claim to speak in the name of the American
people when they endorse Israel's crimes are lying. People are pouring onto
the streets in the United States and everywhere else in the world to demand:
"Free Palestine - Let Gaza live!"

Below are some photos from the demonstration. If you have images of the
demonstration or people traveling to the demonstration, please send them
to info@answercoalition.org.

The
Israeli attack on Gaza isn't just ongoing - it's accelerating. Where
are the leaders of major Jewish organizations?

Jerry
Silverman, Rabbi David Saperstein, and Rabbi Steve Gutow. If they
acted for justice, they could make a real difference.

Tell
Jewish leaders to stand up for justice.

Dear
Dick,

I
am outraged.

As
of today, 1,300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since July 8th.
In just a 14-hour stretch Monday, 100 people were killed. The only
working power plant in Gaza was destroyed by the Israeli military
yesterday. Seven children were killed while playing on a
swingset. On Sunday, the army shelled a UN-run school after specifically
hearing from staff people there that they needed more time to evacuate.

It
is beyond horrendous. Beyond heartbreaking. Beyond anything I can
imagine.

And
yet, the response from institutional Jewish community leaders hasn't
just been utter silence with regard to the suffering of
Palestinians. It has included an appalling degree of outright
war-mongering and victim-blaming. As though the occupation and illegal
siege of Gaza simply didn't exist.

So please - sign our letter today to these
three major Jewish organizational heads: Jerry Silverman at the Jewish
Federations of North American, Rabbi David Saperstein at the Religious
Acton Center, and Rabbi Steve Gutow at the Jewish Council on Public
Affairs. These supposed leaders of our community need to know that
their unbending support for Israeli aggression is simply wrong.

I
want Jewish leaders who honor the value of Jewish and Palestinian lives
as inherently, unequivocally equal. I want Jewish leaders who will
speak in passionate opposition to US policies that fund a human rights
catastrophe committed in our names.

I
love my friends and family in Israel - and never want them to have the
terrifying experience of rockets overhead. And I also want Jewish
leaders who understand killing Palestinians and imposing an occupation
and siege on Gaza will never, ever make them safer.

In
the hopes that can one day be true, we drafted an email to send to the
leadership of some of these Jewish communal organizations that are
shamefully silent as Israel attacks basic Palestinian infrastructure
and kills hundreds of Palestinian children.

In
the spirit of tochecha, sacred rebuke, we urge you to take a public
stand not just for an immediate ceasefire, but for an end to the
underlying conditions of siege that makes life unbearable for
Palestinians in Gaza.

These
leaders have real power. They are actively influencing US policy in our
names - policies that include unanimous Congressional votes in support
of this attack, increased military aid to fund it, and US
obstructionism at the United Nations. Click here to add your name.

I really
believe that hearing from thousands of US Jews will be hard for them to
ignore. It is time we speak up and encourage others to—especially
those in the Jewish community who haven’t raised their voices before in
this way—-and not let mainstream American Jewish leaders’ silence confuse
the opposition from the Jewish community to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

We
will deliver this letter to each of these leaders next week. But we
want your name on it first.

The
following is
Gaza's Ark weekly digest
of 2 posts in all languages on our
website:
* Norway and Egypt to host donor conference for Gazahttp://tinyurl.com/mudotyj
* Norway: Gaza reconstruction aid conditioned on lifting of blockadehttp://tinyurl.com/mddhy53
Thank you for keeping informed about our work.
Together we can break the blockade of Gaza!
Best regards,
Gaza's Arkinfo@gazaark.org

Gaza’s
Ark

Gaza's
Ark

4:00
AM (12 hours ago)

Dear
subscriber and endorser --

You are receiving this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new
updates
are posted or you have endorsed Gaza's Ark.

The following is Gaza's Ark weekly digest of 7 posts in all languages on our
website: [These older reports go back
to July 2014.]

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Contents
Gaza Newsletter #5

End
the Occupation, NATIONAL RALLY JULY 24

Attack,
Civilian Deaths

Barnard, NYT, Civilian
Toll Climbing

Video of Bombing Victims on a Street

Amy Goodman, Gaza Hospital Bombed

Protest

August
2 March

SEVERAL
FROM TIKKUN

Intro. By Rabbi Lerner

Hass,
Gazans Killed

Israel
Provoked This War by Henry Siegman

Ponomarev,
Gaza a Living Hell and Goya’s “Third of May, 1808

Morally
Depraved Zionist Regime

Poem by
Hammad

Yoffie on
US Jews

End the Occupation

Avnery, Netanyahu’s Stupidity

Jewish Voice for Peace

Judis, Who’s Most Responsible?

Chris Hedges, Palestinian Right to Self-Defense

HAW Statement

The Nation, Impunity

Rabbani

Amy Goodman, Democracy
Now

Niemela, Myths

Omer, Two Articles on Nowhere to Run or Hide

War Resisters League, Actions and a Film

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR): No Support
for Israeli War Crimes